How the Recession is Hitting Sports Part 1

With the economy in a downward spiral (no I do not believe in this greenshoots crap), not even sports is shielded from its devastating effects. Recently, the WNBA has opened up sponsorship on its jerseys and the NFL will have corporate sponsorship on its practice jerseys. These recent developments have initated a new trend: corporate sponsorship on jerseys. Tom Wilson, the CEO of The Palace sports which hosts the Detroit Pistons have openly claimed:

“We’d be foolish not to explore the option. We’re under real pressure with sports team salaries, and combined with a time like this, this is when people find radical solutions. Ticket sales alone are not going to do it anymore. The teams that are the most desperate are the ones that are going to think farthest out of the box.”

Gee Tom, have you ever thought about GMs lowering the salary of the athletes. The concept isn’t that difficult, you either increase revenue or decrease expenses until the team is profitable again. Seeing how many teams in the NBA, the NHL are unprofitable and frankly sucks, it will be difficult to increase ticket prices significantly. Then you look at your expenses. You can either stop building new stadiums that will cost both the tax payer and the team or you can decrease the salary of players.

Two questions come to mind when a player’s salary is decreased. One is, won’t the player will simply move to another team. Well if most franchises are really suffering like they say they are, they simply won’t have the money to pay players exhorbant amount of money and thus a market price will be set lower than the current price. Although you will have your retarded GMs, *cough* Isiah Thomas *cough*, most GMs are not dumb enough to way overpay.

Another question that comes to play is how will athletes live on a million dollar a year salary. How will they pay for their Bentleys, alimony, and guns to shoot in a nightclub? It sure will be a hard life. Back when the NBA lockout in 1999, Patrick Ewing was quoted as saying:

“People don’t understand. We may make a lot of money, but we also spend a lot of money”

Kenny Anderson said:

“If this keeps up much longer, I may have to sell one of my cars”

Pretty soon you’ll realize that a we will need to start a donation fund to athletes for them to live a marginally good life. What makes contract negotiations difficult is players unions that set ridiculous minimums for veterns in the league. These unions are the same unions that drove GM bankrupt with their ridiculous demands.

How will you feel when your team is owned by AIG and is 4-55. Okalahoma Thunder anyone?

I’m all for free market and that’s why I advocate GMs to stop producing the Eric Dampier and Jerome James of the world and start paying athletes normal salaries if your team is unprofitable. In the same way a Merrill Lynch can justify itself for paying large bonuses because they believe that talent will be “stolen” by competing “firms” thus leading to a downward spiral of the firm, sports team feel like their actions will lead to their same demise. In this environment, I will ask you how many other teams will anti up the money for potential “talent”?

We need to return to a time when players play more for the love of the sport than for the money they think they derseve. Afterall, taking a couple million dollar pay cut will still allow you to be earn in the top 1% of the 1% in the world’s population. Basically 99.9999999 percentile.

Bottom line: No logos on the jerseys please. They are fugly. Leave that to the folks at NASCAR.